Meetings are a common everyday occurrence especially for members of an organization. Groups of people assemble often to discuss one or more predetermined topics. By way of example, there are status meetings, budget meetings, staff meetings, product development meetings, patent disclosure meetings, and board meetings, among many others. Meetings are viewed by organizations as an important vehicle for facilitating communication amongst group members for the purpose of disseminating knowledge, problem solving, brainstorming and/or the like. Accordingly, many spend a large portion of their time in meetings. In fact, business, meetings are so pervasive that some joke that there needs to be a meeting solely to schedule the next meeting.
Meetings can be informal or formal. Informal meetings can occur anytime or any place. For instance, these meetings can occur in a hallway upon a chance encounter or over breakfast or lunch. One distinguishing feature is the lack of planning or preparedness of participant. Formal meetings are much more organized and structured. They often occur in designated meeting or conference rooms with various equipment including whiteboards, computers, recorders, projectors, and television monitors, among other things. Of course, some meetings can include both informal and formal characteristics.
Various technologies have been developed with the goal to promote and improve the effectiveness of meetings. Presentation software was designed to help organize and present material in a series of slides including test, graphics, audio, and/or video. Teleconferencing was developed to enable remote users to participate in a meeting over the telephone. Video conferencing added to teleconferencing by also providing the ability of participates to see as well as hear one another. In furtherance thereof, some meeting rooms are custom designed and constructed with built-in cameras, microphones and the like. Alternatively, portable dedicated systems including specialized equipment can be moved from room to room. Software also exists for providing a presentation mechanism to enable remote meeting participants to easily view individuals and/or materials over the Internet. Indeed, the term webinar has recently been coined to refer to this type of web conferencing.